Surviving Mars being included as an Xbox Live Free Plays Days game coincides with the release of a number of piece of DLC for the game.

These extras for the Xbox One title are the new Green Planet expansion and the Project Laika pack which were released this week.

If you decide to purchase Surviving Mars after your Xbox Live taster then you can make a big saving on it.

At the time of writing Microsoft is offering 67 per cent off Surviving Mars for a limited time only.

This reduces the Xbox One game’s price for £23.99 to £7.91.

Surviving Mars is available as an Xbox Live free game until May 19 11.59pm pacific time.

For those in the UK, that means it’s available until May 20 7.59am BST.

In other Xbox Live news, Microsoft has this week released a new update that offers a number of changes and tweaks to the service.

Most of these updates are based around improving services connected to your Xbox Live account, including how you interact with people through your Friends List.

The May 2019 Xbox Update officially includes improvements to your friends list, messaging, and better sorting in My Games & Apps.

Here’s a full rundown on everything that has been tweaked this week…

Friends list now shows where your friends are playing –We know that your friends play games across many different devices, including Xbox One, Windows 10, and mobile. To make it easier for you to know what, and where, your friends are playing we are making an update to your friends list! With this feature, we are adding unique Xbox One, PC, or mobile icons next to each of your friends in your friends list showing you which device they are currently playing on.

Message Requests –Your messages are getting smarter. Xbox is adding a new Message Requests feature which will prioritise messages from your friends and anyone you want to communicate with while separating out messages from people you don’t know into a secondary message requests tab.

As part of this update, unfortunately, all previous group messages will be lost in the transition and will require manual action to archive. If you want to back up any previous group messages, you can copy/paste them from Xbox.com for a limited time. Your messages with individual users will not be impacted. Please go here if you wish to review your messages.

Better Sorting in My Games & Apps –Our team has made it even easier to find the content you’re looking for in My Games & Apps. Articles such as “a,” “an” and “the” will no longer be used to sort titles when using the “Sort A-Z” and “Group by letter” views. For example, “The Witcher” will now be found under “W” instead of “T.” Thanks so much to our Xbox community for helping prioritise this change by voting in our recent “My Games & Apps” Idea Drive, and don’t forget to check the Xbox Idea Hub for other topics to which you can contribute.

• Stay tuned to Express.co.uk for more Xbox One news and gaming updates